On Mother Trees: What Old-Growth Trees Taught Me About Parenting

I was helpful, but unlike the giving tree, I was not entirely happy.

This is Mother of All Messes, a column by Kaitlyn Teer on the work of mothering in the climate crisis. 

Years ago, I sent a copy of The Giving Tree to a pregnant family member. Though I hadn’t read the picture book since childhood, I recognized the cheerful green of its cover and vaguely remembered it being about a boy who loved a tree. A classic with an environmental message, I thought, as I typed in the shipping address along with a short personal note.

It wasn’t until I became a parent several years later that I read the book again, a gift for my firstborn. On the cover was a little boy in red overalls looking up at a tree. A leafy branch reached down to offer a round red apple. The boy held out his hands, wanting.

I turned to the first page. “Once there was a tree . . .” By the book’s end, there was a stump. I brought my fingertip to the page, following the circles of its rings. The little boy had grown into a man who took and took and took from the tree he claimed to love.

Horrified that I had ever sent this gift to a new parent, I closed the book and tucked it away in the back of a closet, where I knew my children would not find it. But as I went about my day, its final line returned to me: “And the tree was happy.”

This was not the relationship to the natural world I wanted for myself or my children. And, in early motherhood, when so much was being asked of me, I feared what would happen if I too gave of myself until not much remained. Had I once believed that this is what it meant to love?

*

In western Washington, where I live, the maples, cottonwoods, and cedars shrug over the shingled rooftops of craftsmen and bungalows, holding up the low, gray rain clouds. Shortly after my first child was born, it was these neighborhood trees that helped me to see how motherhood had altered my vision.

My daughter was about a week old when we took a walk. The winter air felt cold and wet after days spent indoors with the thermostat set higher than usual because I worried about keeping her warm enough. I wanted to do something normal, a walk around the neighborhood. But I felt raw and new. Too anxious to attempt baby-wearing, I left the cloth wrap wadded up on the sofa and instead slowly buckled my daughter into her infant car seat, then struggled to connect the car seat to the stroller attachments, eventually ceding the task to my spouse. I tied a knit cap under her chin and bundled her up with a blanket.

Had I once believed that this is what it meant to love? 

The walk was more for me than for her. When they are newborns, babies are nearsighted; they can only see as far as the face of the person holding them. Every two hours I would bring my daughter to my chest to feed her, and we’d meet each other’s gaze. I was always bending my head toward her, guiding her as she latched, assessing the position of her chin and lips, searching for signs of swallowing. In between feedings, I struggled to fall asleep, and when I dreamed, I dreamed of her face.

Out on the slushy sidewalk, it took time for my eyes to adjust to daylight and distance. When I finally looked up, it was the overwhelming sight of treetops—a sight I can still see if I close my eyes, the clarity of dark branches against a milky sky—that made me realize my own nearsightedness, born of love. Since the night of my daughter’s birth, I had only been looking down at what I was holding closest.

By spring, I was taking my daughter with me on short hikes beneath Douglas fir and western red cedar where the Cascade Range meets the Salish Sea. I craved the expansiveness of the sea, the sight of a distant horizon.

That fall, I wore my daughter in her pack to a climate protest in front of city hall and listened as an Indigenous elder warned of the threat that droughts and heat waves pose to the trees I had come to love, the trees our ecosystem depends on. A child climbed one of the tallest trees on the municipal grounds and sat in its branches. I looked up when I heard him yelling to the crowd below, “Shout like your house is on fire.” So I did.

*

Six months into the pandemic, my daughter was approaching her second birthday and I was preparing for the start of a new academic quarter when I began to think about a beloved tree called Old Survivor. An old-growth coastal redwood, it is the last of its kind in the East Bay hills. My place-based literature students and I were reading Jenny Odell’s account of the tree in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Old Survivor’s unruly shape and its location on a rocky slope made it undesirable to loggers, who deemed it unusable; its apparent uselessness allowed it to survive. Odell held up Old Survivor as a model for how to “resist in place,” which she defines as “to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.” Odell urges readers to put down our screens, if only temporarily, in order to cultivate an attentiveness to place, a rootedness that attaches us to our bioregion and all of the creatures whom we share it with. She rejects capitalist framings of productivity and growth, especially when the cost is environmental destruction, in favor of honoring the cyclical labor of maintenance and care work, the kind of work I performed when mothering.

Though I appreciated Odell’s manifesto on resisting exploitative systems, I came to subtly resent the book’s title. I’d assigned it to my students at a time when my spouse and I were both working full-time from home without childcare, a time when the attention economy held us as we turned to our screens for nearly everything, a time when the world had ground to a halt but one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do was nothing.

I had it good in so many ways—we hadn’t lost our jobs, we could isolate at home, my spouse joined me in cooking, cleaning, and caring for our daughter when he wasn’t working, and a friend watched my daughter a few hours a week while I logged onto Zoom and taught. Still, I was cut off from our normal support systems and working two jobs in addition to being our child’s primary caregiver. My hours were flexible, so I worked whenever my daughter slept, worked during nap times, worked in the hours after she went to bed and the ones before she woke. Remarking on pandemic parenting, a sociologist put it this way: “Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

I loved my family, I loved my work, I loved my students. And yet I was tired of being useful, of giving until my resources were depleted. I was tired of trying to coax my daughter to sleep so that her naps would coincide with Zoom meetings, tired of sending emails assuring the recipients that, of course, I was happy to help. I was helpful, but unlike the giving tree, I was not entirely happy.

*

My daughter and I walked every day during the first year of the pandemic. We marked the changing seasons by the neighborhood trees.

We walked by playgrounds that were closed off with caution tape, we walked to deliver flowers to friends, we walked to protests. Sometimes we walked multiple times a day. Sometimes a neighbor saw us coming and crossed the street to avoid close contact. Sometimes I pushed our stroller down the sidewalks, listening to a podcast or weeping quietly, unobserved by my forward-facing daughter. Sometimes I walked with a trusted older friend, both masked and keeping our distance. Sometimes I held my daughter’s hand and we progressed at a toddler’s pace, stopping to notice every little thing.

I was noticing even more about our neighborhood by reading a weekly email bulletin compiled by a neighbor, who had spent the last twenty years facilitating email exchanges about items found or for sale, babysitter offers, and information about voting, community service, and an annual emergency-preparedness meeting. Through her postings, I joined the so-called soup brigade of volunteers who distributed regular meals to an encampment of people without homes who were occupying the grounds in front of city hall to protest the housing crisis.

Without realizing it, I was doing nothing, the kind of nothing Odell extolls when she writes of the importance of public spaces and public art, of the ethics of care and maintenance, of deep listening to one’s community. Odell writes, “I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one’s participation in history and in a more-than-human community.”

And yet I was tired of being useful, of giving until my resources were depleted.

One day the sidewalks were covered in chalk art, a socially distant DIY art festival. One day the branches of a small magnolia tree were laden with handmade cloth masks, free for the taking. One day we noticed a new mural installed on the side of a musical instrument shop; it featured text messages about climate change from local schoolchildren: Habitat loss makes me furious. Heartbroken. Disgusted. Scared.

My daughter and I walked together until it was early autumn and wildfire smoke forced us indoors for weeks, our walks on hold while distant forests smoldered. I felt confined and on edge. Even at a distance, my animal body judged the smoke a threat. Just as I was reading about Old Survivor, the air-quality index was approaching levels that were deemed hazardous, one of the many problems about which it felt like I could do very little, maybe even nothing, as I pondered what it means to resist in place.

*

Once the rain returned to the Pacific Northwest and the wildfire smoke cleared, we resumed our daily walks. One winter morning, I pushed the stroller through a fine wintry mist while listening to a podcast about the work of Suzanne Simard. Working in the old-growth forests of nearby British Columbia, Simard was among the first researchers to use Western science to demonstrate that trees communicate with one another through a mycorrhizal network that mirrors our own neural networks. Her findings suggest that a forest may act as a single organism, connected for interspecies cooperation rather than competition.

Simard calls the oldest trees in a forest “mother trees,” named for the way they nurture nearby seedlings by distributing carbon and water, alerting them to threats, and caring for them in distress. When I heard this, I reached in my coat pocket for my phone and removed a glove with my teeth, swiping the rain-splattered screen to rewind. As I listened, I felt gratitude for the people in my life who have mothered me, even those who do not have children of their own; those who have walked beside me and my stroller, sharing their wisdom and resources. And I wondered about our neighborhood trees, what networks might be humming beneath my feet, whether their ties might be severed by the construction of neighborhoods like mine.

Around the time that the podcast about Simard’s work aired, The New York Times launched its primal scream hotline, to record the distress of parents who were struggling to manage the responsibilities of working and caregiving. Mothers pushed to the brink were planning meetups just to scream.

In an interview, Simard critiques Western approaches to forest management, saying, “When we manage ecosystems . . . it’s like we manage them just to survive. We don’t manage them to flourish. We push them to the brink of collapse . . . tak[ing] as much as we possibly can.”

In an ongoing collaborative experiment called the Mother Tree Project, Simard studies alternatives to clear-cutting in which the mother trees are preserved rather than harvested. The project emerges from partnerships with First Nations and offers possibilities for sustainable stewardship of forest ecosystems.

Hearing this, I thought of the forest ecosystems under threat as climate-exacerbated droughts and heat waves make for longer, more intense wildfire seasons. I thought of the boy who grew up to be a man who took and took from the tree he loved. And I thought of our society’s focus on the isolated nuclear family, how mothers in particular are pushed to the brink of collapse by extractive structures, how difficult it is for mothers—especially single parents, women of color, and immigrants—to flourish.

I want a sustainable approach to mothering, I thought, weeping again as I kept pushing the stroller. I want us to organize ourselves with the wisdom of the forest.

*

My daughter enjoys foraging our neighborhood for apples, gleaning what our neighbors allow to fall from their trees. Last year, she found one tree in particular that produced sweet round apples that no one else seemed to want, and she returned to it often. Once, when our fridge was bare of fruit, she outfitted herself in her raincoat and set out on her tricycle to gather its apples. This year, because of the weather, the tree did not bear fruit.

I haven’t told you yet about my favorite tree. The decades-old fig tree in our front yard, the one I think of when I see the stump in the picture book.

Last year when the fig tree was ripe, my spouse and daughter would stand in the yard picking and hand me fresh fruit through an open window. I was pregnant with our son then, and the figs were a welcome indulgence. We had so much fruit that I struggled to keep up with the boxes softening on our kitchen counter, attracting fruit flies, and I worried about the figs going to waste. I canned what I could, making jam with my daughter and looking over at her only to experience a strange yearning to somehow preserve something of her, something more tangible than photographs. And then I placed the rest of the figs on our front porch with a sign that said, “FREE,” then posted to our neighborhood Buy Nothing group. Within an hour, the remaining figs were gone.

This spring, just one leaf unfurled on our fig tree; the rest of its branches remained bare. On a warm day, I looked out the window and the tree looked as it had in winter. Though it had stood for decades, I suspected the year of extreme weather, winds that brought once-in-a-millennia heat, once-in-a-century flooding, and record-breaking cold had been too much for it to survive.

I kept to myself indoors, nursing my son, while my spouse used a chainsaw to bring down the leafless branches, cutting it into pieces. We mourned our loss together, talking of the trees we would someday plant. In a gesture of consolation, my neighbor, who has lived in this neighborhood for longer than I’ve been alive, walked across the street when his own tree ripened, delivering a box of fresh figs.

*

Sometimes loggers leave what is called a timber curtain, a scrim of trees that gives the appearance that a forest has not been clear-cut. If anything, the pandemic has further exposed the conditions of mothering—how we undervalue and exploit those who perform maintenance and care work—that have existed all along in this country. Behind the timber curtain of idealized depictions of motherhood, behind the myth of the Ideal Mother, all along there has been a clear-cut.

In The Giving Tree, the boy who loves the tree visits her every day to play and eat apples. As a child, he gathers her leaves to play king of the forest, a way of relating to the natural world that carries him into adulthood. As he ages, he takes the apples to sell for cash, takes the branches to build a house, takes the trunk to sail away. He carved a heart into her trunk and then cut it down.

Someday I may read the picture book to my children, perhaps when they are old enough to grieve for the tree and discuss its plight. I will close the book and ask them, “But do you think that, in the end, the tree was truly happy? Did the boy really love the tree?”

In her memoir, Finding the Mother Tree, Simard writes of a sweet spot at the dripline of a mature Douglas fir where water falls from its outermost needles. Directly below its canopy, the ground is bare. Nothing grows there. Its crown above and its roots below gather the nutrients the tree needs to survive. But at the dripline, close enough to share resources without starving the mother tree, seedlings take root.

The sweet spot is what many of us are still searching for, I think. The chapter concludes with Simard reflecting on the difficulty in balancing work and motherhood; she describes her treacherous nine-hour commute home to her daughters and the eventual dissolution of her marriage. It occurs to me that when it comes to mothering, the sweet spot may only be achievable through community care and efforts to “resist in place”; in other words, to grow in places and in shapes that disrupt our exploitation, to look up from our screens and pay attention to the places where we live beside others in our animal bodies, to nurture and value these connections and engage in mutual aid and community mothering.

At the kitchen table, I hold my son in my lap while my daughter draws a map of the neighborhood, marking out where her friends live and which trees have the best apples. I do not begrudge my children what I give to them; I’m grateful for how mothering has altered my vision, how I am still learning what it means to love, to care for those closest to me and those at a distance. And it’s my love for myself and for my children that compels me to refuse to be destroyed by motherhood, that insists I work toward a society where an equitable division of household labor is the norm, where parents and families have the structural support they need to thrive.

There are two jars of fig jam remaining in our pantry, golden and flecked with fruit flesh. For breakfast I open a jar and spread it thick on a buttered slice of toast. I know that, like the fig tree, a changing climate will take from me more of what I love, what I cannot protect. When that happens, I hope my neighbors will have fruit enough to share. Warm and sweet, I take a bite that reminds me of a tree I truly loved, of something I preserved before I knew it was gone for good.